Paul Trout
English
MSU-Bozeman
Of indictments of higher education there is no end. Nor should there be.
One of the most detailed and wide-ranging is Sperber's Beer and Circus, a no-holds-barred expose of forces corrupting undergraduate education. While the focused on "sports," the book also has scathing things to say about the campus alcohol culture, admissions office scams, the "myth" of the great researcher as teacher, the ignoble "non-aggression" pact between research-obsessed professors and party-obsessed students, student cheating, grade inflation, and a number of other touchy topics.
Sperber's thesis is that many universities--especially big state universities (where 40 percent of all students are educated)--have willfully devalued undergraduate education in a reckless pursuit of prestige through research. To keep students coming back despite the awful classroom conditions most have to endure, universities--Sperber contends--provide students with spectator sports and liberal drinking policies. This beer-and-circus policy keeps students happy, and the tuition dollars rolling in. At some Big-time U's, the undergraduate experience now amounts to a four-year tailgate party with a hefty yearly cover charge.
No sane administrator is going to admit to this shabby arrangement, but one comes close: "There is certainly no plot or conspiracy by school officials on this. You have to remember that most universities are always in a money bind. We sure as hell can't get enough money out of our state legislature or anyone else to turn our undergraduate education program into one big honors college. But we need every undergraduate dollar we can get...and we can swallow the million bucks a year that the athletic department costs us.... Maybe that's how it all happens. I can assure you that we never thought any of this out beforehand, nor did any other school" (224-225).
Beer and Circus is most effective when driving home the case that undergraduate education at Big-time U's is a dismal affair indeed. The center-piece of the undergraduate experience is the huge lecture class where an often disengaged instructor drones on in front of a gallery of anonymous and equally disengaged students.
In the 1980s, the Carnegie Foundation found that a large percentage of undergraduate students at research universities reported that "most" or "all" of their classes had more than 100 students enrolled in them. At Indiana University, Sperber teaches freshmen English classes of more than 140 students. The Insider's Guide to Colleges says that most required lecture classes for first-year students enroll between 200 and 500 students, with students enduring the insult by "gazing off into space" (88-89). At some schools, such as the University of Illinois, there are lecture courses with more than 1,000 students in them. While universities like to say that this situation is improving, Sperber points out that the number of classes with more than 50 students is growing, not declining.
A large lecture course may be an cost-effective way to process students, but it is not an effective way to educate them. Sperber cites studies showing that this generation of students learns better in a student-centered, active-learning environment than by listening passively to lectures (90). So-called "discussion" sections don't help because studies show that they are usually lectures too. Although small classes in which students do a lot of talking and writing are better for students, any talk of an individualized instructional approach "strikes fear into faculty who want to spend minimal time with undergraduates, as well as administrators who want to keep their universities as research-oriented and cost-efficient as possible" (90).
At most research universities, then, the students who need the very best teaching--freshmen--often get the worst. And this is by design, according to Sperber. Thrusting freshmen into mammoth lecture classes is a way "to persuade entering students to passively accept inferior education as the norm" (114). One professor at a Big-time U acknowledges that this is the point of vast, dehumanizing lecture classes. "Who wants a lot of undergraduate psychology majors hanging around a research department?" (113). Students get the message. At one research institution, only 14 percent of students strongly agreed with the statement, "Students Come First."
Sperber cleverly exploits how administrators tout their Honors Programs to argue that they do know that large lecture courses are stultifying and that students thrive in smaller classes taught by experienced professors. One university proudly advertises that its honors program--enrolling a small percentage of all undergraduates--"is for enthusiastic and energetic students who enjoy small classes, extensive discussions with professors, and the challenge of articulating and refining their ideas." Maybe more students would be enthusiastic and energetic if they didn't have to endure huge classes that discouraged active intellectual engagement and rapport with professors.
Postings on Sperber's website make clear that many students join the Animal-House, beer-and-circus culture only after their hopes of getting a solid education were dashed by large lecture courses and unconcerned professors who doled out high grades for little work. Said one, "I feel like just another number at a large state school.... Many of my friends here and at other state schools say the same thing. Also academics is not at the top of my priority list anymore, although it was when I came here, and I've started to live for the weekend parties and buckeye fever" (115). Another said, "This school treats the average student like shit, and so we blow off our classes and party" (98).
One administrator mentioned to Sperber that his university had to stop saying that "we provide a good education--our lawyers warned us that we could get sued for misrepresentation. But we sure promote our college sports teams" (xii).
It's de rigeur for critics to make recommendations, and Sperber obliges with a string of predictable proposals: unprepared and immature students should start out in junior colleges; faculty should be hired and rewarded for teaching undergraduates; all lecture courses should be abolished and replaced by "small classes where students and instructors constantly interact"; research universities should establish their pure research programs as profit-making institutes mainly funded by corporations; athletic scholarships should be replaced by only need-based grants; and, all undergraduates should have to pass an exit "outcomes and assessment" exam.
All are plausible, but Sperber doesn't believe things will improve, so he follows "what should be done" with "what probably will happen," and that amounts to college athletes being paid.
While much of what Sperber says strikes me as true, much of it also has been said before, and more incisively and engagingly. That's a pity, because the people who need to read this book--taxpayers, legislators, students and their tuition-paying parents--probably won't, thanks to poor editing and organization.
Sperber thinks he is the first to have the epiphany that schools were substituting beer and circuses for real education, but he is not. Ten years ago Page Smith, in Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America, outlined Sperber's argument in describing conditions on campus in 1900. Even then, research and graduate study were privileged, with "undergraduates getting an inferior education." And even then, the bargain was to let undergraduates enjoy themselves. "Fraternities, sororities, football games, proms, and hops were the principal foci of undergraduate life," a situation he labels "bread and circuses" (74-75).
Another problem is with Sperber's treatment of sports. The subtitle accuses "big-time college sports" of crippling undergraduate education, but Sperber actually argues that "prestige maximization" through research is the real culprit, and that sports merely compensate students for an arid and humiliating educational environment. He does make it clear, however, that when sports become "big time," they do help erode and corrupt undergraduate education.
Though not without stylistic and organizational shortcomings, Beer and Circus is filled with provocative data about the dark side of higher education (cheating, grade inflation, the non-aggression pact between professors and students that has led to so many semi-literate college graduates, etc.). Read it if you can stand being stripped of idealistic illusions and hope.